Sikh Slayings: White Anxiety Gone Extreme

America's browning drives a backlash that found its most virulent strain in Wade Michael Page.

(The Root) -- When Wade Michael Page walked into a Wisconsin temple last wesek, murdering six Sikh worshippers and critically wounding three others, it was an incident waiting to happen.

As the neo-Nazi loser marched through the temple randomly shooting one Sikh after the next, perhaps the "14 words" motto of white supremacists was running through his warped mind: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

To the insecure and frightened haters in our nation, the end of white dominance in America is increasingly inevitable. Besides being red, white and blue, the good old US of A is steadily becoming brown, black and yellow -- a majority-minority nation.

During a 12-month period that ended July 2011, for the first time in America's modern history, more minority babies were born than white babies. Casually referred to by white supremacists as members of "the mud races," Hispanic, black and Asian newborns made up 50.4 percent of the nation's births during that period. Just 22 years ago, minority births accounted for a much lower figure -- 37 percent.

"White supremacist groups have been having a meltdown since the Census Bureau predicted that non-Hispanic whites would lose the majority by 2050," said Mark Potok, spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitored Wade Michael Page in particular for the past 12 years, and hate groups in general for much longer than that. "The demographic change in this country is the single-most-important driver in the growth of hate groups and extremist groups over the last few years," he told ABC News.

Last year Potok's organization reported that hate groups in America had exploded to more than 1,000 from 602 at the beginning of the millennium.

Domestic terrorist Page, a 40-year-old U.S. Army reject, who died from a self-inflicted wound during the Oak Creek massacre, could take credit for some of that growth. For more than a decade, Page had been playing hate music. He played with white-power heavy-metal bands affiliated with Hammerskins Nation, and he led a couple of bands of his own, Definite Hate and End Apathy. His music appealed to other young white losers, creating new haters every day. It also raised money to help bankroll other hate groups like the National Alliance, the violent hate group that inspired Timothy McVeigh to blow up a Oklahoma City federal building in 1995.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, which also monitors America's white supremacy groups, the names of these racists bands reveal what's on their minds and in their hearts, names like Grinded Nig, Jew Slaughter and Aggravated Assault. "In keeping with its attempts to reach out to young people, one label, named Resistance Records, even markets a white supremacist video game, 'Ethnic Cleansing,' " the ADL reports on its website. "The game is a first-person-shooter in which the player takes on the role of a white warrior in a future 'Race War,' who must kill all nonwhites to ensure 'the survival of your kind.' "

Although these virulent, malicious white supremacists, who wear their hate on their tattoo sleeves and everywhere else, are more or less a limited group of bigots, they may merely be the underbelly of a larger phenomenon.

When the Tea Party and other conservatives cry, "We want our country back," it doesn't take much imagination to translate what that means as the nation's demographics and culture continue their colorful shift.

Mainstream conservatives have been spewing coded, dog-whistle racist messages since Ronald Reagan's "Welfare Queen" speech in 1976 and the Willie Horton ad employed in the George H.W. Bush 1988 campaign against Michael Dukakis. More recently, the billionaire Koch brothers and their right-wing organization, Americans for Prosperity, were accused of buying a North Carolina school board in an effort to resegregate the Wake County school system.

So I wasn't exactly shocked when conservatives attacked Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano when she issued a report in April 2009 warning that right-wing extremists threaten American security. The nine-page report, titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," documented the smoldering hate among the nation's extreme right-wing groups, warning that some individuals might commit violent acts. "If such violence were to occur," the report said, "it likely would be isolated, small-scale, and directed at specific immigration-related targets."

Conservative commentator Michelle Malkin posted a blog with this headline: "Confirmed: The Obama DHS Hit Job on Conservatives Is Real."

I would like to attribute all this hate to good old-fashioned American exceptionalism, but I would be wrong.

A year ago, Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik went on a shooting and bombing spree that left 77 people dead, many of them teenagers, almost all of them Muslims. Like his brethren in the U.S., he hated Muslims, he hated people who didn't look like him and he hated cultural diversity.

I fear this is just the beginning. Not only are some white Americans threatened by the encroaching "mud races," but there is a quickening recognition around the planet that the world is yellow, brown and black.

Cyber columnist Monroe Anderson is a veteran Chicago journalist who has written signed op-ed-page columns for both the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and executive-produced and hosted his own local CBS TV show. He was also the editor of Savoy Magazine. Follow him on Twitter.

September 07, 2011

On the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 tragedy, the Chicago Sun-Times assigned all its Sunday op-ed columnists to write on the subject. Below is what I wrote. I've cut and pasted it from a wingnut website, Free Republic. If you'll notice, I got honored with a very grown-up "Barf Alert."

Well, five years have passed. We're Bush-free but still stuck in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We're also still afraid.

We can't catch a flight without going shoeless first and we're more than likely to have to show our private parts to a TSA agent before we're allowed to board. Osama bin Laden is dead but his terror lives on. So does his toll on American freedom and finances. We've spent ourselves into a hole by occupying two countries in our pursuit of invisible men. While we've been blowing things up for the past decade, China has been building and building and building.

We're still stuck in the quagmire with President Obama afraid to pull the plug, rightly fearing that the Republicans will successfully label him our soft on terror, anti-American, pro-Arab, freedom-hating commander-in-chief.

Ten years after 9/11, we're still nation-building in the Middle East while the Midwest in our nation is falling apart. So, for this next presidential election, I think Obama should be making a 911 call for America--we need the emergency services.

Five years after the 9/11 tragedy, the kingpin of Abraham Lincoln's party is still dead set on fooling most of the people most of the time.

President Bush and his chorus of Republican pols, Cabinet members and neo-con sycophants would have us believe we're safer or, depending on political expediencies, not that safe. According to the president's pre-9/11 anniversary speeches on the progress of the war on terror, we're safer than we were before the attacks but not yet safe enough to steer clear of his failed stay-the-course strategy. As Bush explains it, al-Qaida's leadership is decimated but remains dangerous enough to destroy the entire civilized world.

There he goes again.

With midterm congressional elections less than two months away, the Bush subterfuge machine is in full spiel and spin. Too incompetent to manage problems that are all too real to mainstream America, such as high gas prices, 45 million citizens without health insurance and a sliding income for middle-class workers -- or capturing Osama bin Laden for that matter -- the president and his forces are back to wheeling and dealing terror. They're playing the same fear-mongering three-card monte game that worked so well in the 2002 and 2004 elections: See if you can find the terrorist threat under here or here or there. Find Saddam Hussein's ethereal weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Watch the politically timed color alert rise and fall on cue.

There's a book just out with a title that sums it all up: Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal and the Selling of the Iraq War. Authors Michael Isikoff and David Corn report that Bush hated Saddam so much that he privately let loose expletive-laden tirades against the dictator. In March 2002, months before Bush asked Congress for authority to attack Saddam, he bluntly exposed his true intentions in an unguarded moment with two aides. When told that White House correspondent Helen Thomas was questioning the need to oust Saddam, Bush snapped: ''Did you tell her I intend to kick his sorry m - - - - - - - - - - - - ass all over the Mideast?''

The president's anger was understandable. ''After all,'' Bush said six months later while speaking at a fund-raiser in Houston, ''this is the guy who tried to kill my dad.''

I think that's admirable that Bush 43 loves his dad, Bush 41, enough to try to revenge Saddam's botched assassination attempt in 1993. I loved my late dad as much as Bush loves his, and while I too would have been livid if the Iraqi dictator tried to whack my father, I wouldn't have set into motion a wave of international shock and awe that would result in the deaths of more than 2,600 U.S. military men and women and more than 41,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.

I also love my two sons as much as I'm sure he loves his twin daughters. If we're really in danger of Apocalypse Soon, as Bush keeps insisting, then we ought to act like it. The president should re-institute a mandatory military draft. I'll tearfully send my sons off to war, right after Bush tearfully sends his daughters to sign up in our co-educational military. If the war against Islamic terrorists compares to the fight against Nazis, as Bush insists, and if a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq would lead to its conquest by our nation's worst enemies, then we ought to have a military reflecting that clear and present danger. There were 16 million Americans fighting to keep the world safe for democracy in World War II. There are 130,000 in Iraq.

I'm afraid Bush's plan to save the world from Islamic fascism is way too modest. He wants Congress to pass his terrorist surveillance act and authorization to try the al-Qaida detainees held in his secret CIA torture prisons. For reasons too simple for many Americans to understand, he's not interested in following the 9/11 Commission's recommendations to shore up security at U.S. harbors or keep a close watch on checked airplane luggage. Those measures, which would obviously make America safer from the inevitable al-Qaida strikes in the future, would cost big business big money.

But what fool would want to take those measures when it's so much more politically practical to scare most of the people one more time?

September 11, 2009

Watching today's commemorations of the eight anniversary of the 9/11 terrorists attacks, I am reminded of how badly the Bush Administration blew it. The most incompetent presidency in our nation's history presided over the worst failure in national security since Pearl Harbor.

Keeping this in mind, I shake my head, then my fist, whenever Dick Cheney or his darling daughter show up on some TV news talk show bragging about how the Bush Administration's criminal torture practices kept us safe. This isn't just another exercise in tortured logic, it's a sputtering lurch of the right wing old fear trying to journey just a bit further on a road well traveled. The Cheneys, in presenting their mythology about keep us safe since 9/11 have never gotten around to telling us who kept us safe from February 26, 1993, when the World Trade Center was first bombed, until September 11, 2001, when the Towers were tragically toppled.

That stretch of safety, by my count, was one days short of eight years, six months and two weeks. We're not there yet.

I'm also reminded on this day that the Bush Administration failed to pull off the president's bullhorn braggadocio: "And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon."

Well, either Osama bin Laden was deaf or President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney substituted the bullhorn for the dog whistle. The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks never heard from the Bush Administration. Now it's President Obama's turn. He wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. He wants to shift our misguided war efforts from Iraq back to where they should have been concentrated all along.

I'm afraid it's too little, too late. The Bushies had a chance to make a surgical strike right after 9/11. They let the cancer metastasize. They created more terrorists and gave bin Laden and his henchman a chance to slip into Pakistan. The Obama Administration has inherited a bad situation that can only get worse. Sending more of our young men and women into the land where Empires go to die is a losing proposition.

I'm having trouble writing this, but I agree with George Will: We need to bring the troops home. President Obama should adapt the common sense sensitivities of State Senator Obama and apply them to Afghanistan. Should the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan and should al Qaeda crawl out of the caves in Pakistan, we've can always hit them again.

September 24, 2008

John McCain’s change agents are way more interesting—although not as real or competent—than Barack Obama’s. There’s Rick Davis, who is apparently a closet reformer, but publicly a big time lobbyist. In performing the delicate dance of having it both ways, Davis, who has re-fashioned his boss and himself as true reformers, was claiming to have kicked his old lobbying ways, while his firm was being paid $15,000 a month—or $345,000 in total, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. And, of course, there’s Gov. Sarah Palin, the mouse-hunting mom, who rejects earmarks when she’s not pursuing them. But here’s the McCain connection that may be the most revealing: Mark Buse. According to People.com’s Michelangelo Signorile, Buse, McCain’s senate chief of staff, is gay. You might want to think of Buse as Superman gay in that he’s socially out of the closet but professionally still disguised as Clark Kent. Or, maybe Dracula works better as a metaphor—straight by day, gay at night. It makes no difference to me. I think it’s a bad idea to discriminate against people because of their sexual orientation because I believe that most folks are born with straight or gay tendencies, just like some are born right-handed and others left-handed. My problem with McCain is that like a lot of black preachers, he’s been a practicing hypocrite. There are hundreds of black ministers that will deliver an homophobic sermon right after their blatantly gay choir director, following a chorus of amens, has signaled to his singers to take a seat. Similarly, McCain has hired gays on his staff but has campaigned in support of anti-gay marriage amendments and for the continuation of the discriminatory “don’t ask, don’t tell” military policy. On her blog, Pam’s Houseblend, Pam Spaulding explodes the ins and outs of McCain’s hypocrisy and the reaction of the Log Cabin Republicans. Here is some of what she wrote:

The title of the post sums up the dilemma of the Log Cabin Republicans -- "The Politics of Personal Destruction at its Worst."

Mark Buse has been openly gay for years and has acknowledged as much. So the notion that he has been "outed" is simply false. But secondly-and this is the bigger point-this political stunt by Mike Rogers just proves what Log Cabin has been saying for years. John McCain is an inclusive Republican who hires the best people, regardless of sexual orientation.

Then what is the "personal destruction" you are talking about? If Buse is out, then discussing the fact that Mark Buse is gay shouldn't be of any consequence -- unless there is something wrong with being out of the closet to the Republican base.

Isn't that the real problem here? If John McCain is personally inclusive, why can he not be so as a candidate? McCain might consider Buse a family friend and not fire him for being gay, but what about the young gay person working at a DQ with an anti-gay boss -- he has no protections from getting axed if that boss learns of his employee's orientation. It's not inclusion when it only means the people in your inner circle.

September 12, 2008

Watching The Interview with Charlie Gibson, I couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for women, Republicans and John McCain. This was the Trophy Veep exposed. It was the Beauty Queen Interview II, but this time instead of Miss Teen South Carolina, it was way up north with the runner-up in the Alaskan beauty pageant, Miss Congeniality.

It was not a pretty sight.
Sarah Palin didn’t know WTF she was talking about—and when she did, or did not, she lied about it. She didn’t know how NATO works. She didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine was. She continued to spiel an alternate reality about the Bridge to Nowhere by doing some explaining that was reminiscent of Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Caitlin.
The big diff, obviously, is that Caitlin, the adolescent, was competing for an insignificant position that would do no harm. Palin, a woman who should know better, is attempting to be vice president of the United States of America; the number two person to a 72-year-old man with a history of skin cancer. This time next year, under a worse case scenario, she could be the leader of the free world.How uninformed is she? Let me begin to count the ways.
Her foreign policy experience can be summed up very quickly: On a clear day, she can see Russia from Alaska.
Her reformer credentials can also be summarized just as easily: She may have kept The Bridge to Nowhere pork and abused earmarks in Alaska but when she goes to Washington, she’ll make sure such deals have transparency.
Her maverick instincts boil down to this: when she and McCain get to Washington, the beltway boys had better watch out.
Imagine what the right-wing fear and smear machine would be spewing out had Barack Obama spit out such inane answers to Gibson’s questions. Like I said, I feel embarrassed for women because this is only the second time in 20 years that they have one of their own on a major presidential ticket—and this one comes up blushingly short.

I am embarrassed for Republicans and McCain as well.
Do they really believe the American public is so stupid that they’ll buy this pig in a poke—lipstick not withstanding?

August 31, 2008

This much we know for sure: Gov. Sarah Palin, John McCain's choice for his running mate for vice president, is a woman.

There are a few other things we should know. "Sarah was raised amongst the tribe," reports Mudflats, a blog that prides itself in tiptoeing through the Muck of Alaskan Politics, "that believes creationism should be taught in our public schools,
homosexuality is a sin, and life begins at conception. She’s a gun-
toting, hang ‘em high conservative."

So now we know why McCain picked her. We also know that McCain's maverick cred is about as valid as George W. Bush's curiosity cred. But here are some other things we need to know. For example, her own stepmother, Faye Palin, is not sure she's going to vote for her. Her foreign experience boils down to her being in charge of the Alaska's National Guard--with a grand total of 1,875 men and women. And that we should, "Be afraid...Be very afraid," if McCain wins this election, according to the Angry African on the Loose blog because "We are in serious danger if McCain wins this election. Serious danger."

Angry African's blog posts a series of YouTube virals to make his point, while Mudflats runs it all down. Here's the beginning to the Alaskan-based blog.

“Is this a joke?” That seemed to be the question du jour when my
phone started ringing off the hook at 6:45am here in Alaska. I mean,
we’re sort of excited that our humble state has gotten some kind of
national ‘nod’….but seriously? Sarah Palin for Vice President? Yes,
she’s a popular governor. Her all time high approval rating hovered
around 90% at one point. But bear in mind that the 90% approval rating
came from one of the most conservative, and reddest-of-the-red states
out there. And that approval rating came before a series of events
that have lead many Alaskans to question the governor’s once pristine
image.

There is no doubt in my mind that many Alaskans are feeling pretty
excited about this. But we live in our own little bubble up here, and
most of the attention we get is because of The Bridge to Nowhere, polar
bears, the indictment of Ted Stevens, and the ongoing investigation and
conviction of the string of legislators and oil executives who
literally called themselves “The Corrupt Bastards Club”.

So seeing our governor out there in the national spotlight accepting
the nomination for Vice Presidential candidate is just downright
surreal. Just months ago, when rumors surfaced that she was on the
long version of the short list, she was questioned if she’d be
interested in the position. She said she couldn’t answer “until
somebody answers for me what is it exactly that the VP does every day.
I’m used to being very productive and working real hard in an
administration. We want to make sure that that VP slot would be a fruitful type of position, especially for Alaskans and for the things that we’re trying to accomplish up here….”

There is no doubt that Palin has fierce territorial loyalties. When
elected governor there was much concern because she came right out and
said she would favor her own home town of Wasilla (where she was mayor)
and its surrounding environs collectively known as “the Valley” while
leading the state. And it’s obvious from her statement that Alaska was
on her mind when accepting the VP nod (see my emphasis above).

So what is it that we’re “trying to accomplish up here”?

Palin is currently in the middle of a controversial gas pipeline
project in Alaska. She’s favored the ‘Trans Canada’ proposal that will
run the pipeline through Canada, in effect shipping US jobs over the
border. Many Alaskans, including former governors, have favored the
“All Alaska Route”.

She is also sueing the federal government over listing the polar
bears as a threatened species. The science was even compelling enough
to convince the Secretery of the Interior that the bears needed to be
listed. But acknowlegement of this issue, and the potential disruption
to development on Alaska’s oil-rich north slope spurred Palin to
attempt to stop the listing.

Does she want to open ANWR? Yes. Every politician in Alaska wants
to open ANWR. It’s basically a requirement if you ever hope to get
elected for anything. Even Mark Begich, the progressive Democrat
running against the indicted Senator and Alaskan institution Ted
Stevens, is pro-drilling. That’s the sea we swim in up here. There
are a few anti-drilling folks, but you have to look hard to find them,
and work hard to have them admit it.

March 15, 2008

Forever the maverick, John McCain is mixing President George W. Bush’s politics of fear with his own creation: the politics of facetiousness. The presumptive Republican party nominee fears that al-Qaida might try to influence the November general election here with increasing attacks on our troops in Iraq. He worries about it, McCain said during a town hall meeting Friday in Springfield, Pennsylvania, because “I know they pay attention, because of the intercepts we have of their communications."What, he worry? A stepped up war in Iraq or a terrorist attack on America soil could be a godsend to the Arizona Senator, a bonafide war hero. Lest we forget, he’ll be running against either Sen. Barack Obama, whose national security experience boils down to a gutsy, well-thought out anti-war speech, or Sen. Hillary Clinton, whose foreign policy credentials are visits to 80 countries as First Lady in alternating capacities as Ambassador of Good Will or USO-style appearances. For your everyday American voter, right now it’s the economy stupid–something no one is counting on McCain to master. But a serious flare-up abroad will put the Iraqi war back on the front burner and put millions of American voters back on red alert. Of course, a major Iraq attack against our troops will increase the volume on calls to end the occupation but it will stampede the red-state bloc into wagon-circling-and-bunkering-down mode. When the going gets rough, we’ll need a tough guy as the Commander-in-Chief. Who ya gonna call? The Iraqi buster! McCain will argue that only he knows what to do to put those evildoers down once and forever–even if it takes 100 years. The same lot of voters who believed Bush’s war to be a necessary evil will believe McCain too. In fact, should there be a major attack in Iraq–say the last week in September–I’m going to call an expert Crime Scene Investigator. Karl Rove’s fingerprints are bound to be somewhere.

November 17, 2007

After being pimp-slapped by the Republicans for nearly a year, battered and bruised congressional Democrats have come to realize that all four cheeks are so red and raw that they have none left to turn.

Yesterday, senate Repubs road-blocked a $50 billion bill by Democrats that would have paid for several months of combat but also would have ordered troop withdrawals from Iraq to begin within 30 days. In response to the Republican resistance to the will of the American people, the Democrats are finally promising to do what the majority of Americans voted for them to do in last November’s election: bring the troops home.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has come up with a backhanded but effective means of making sure that the end is near for Bush's big blunder; they’re going to sit on the president’s $196 billion request for war spending until next year, forcing his administration to account for its misdeeds.

I say it’s about time.

As an op-ed page columnist at the Chicago Sun-Times, five months ago I pointed out the shortcomings of the Iraq occupation and of the new majority party’s failure to end it.

This is what I wrote back then. Today, while the death toll in Iraq has dropped from record numbers earlier in the year, it keeps on rising.

Bring troops home now

May 20, 2007

By Monroe Anderson

We're waist-deep in George W. Bush's nightmarish Middle East misadventure as the new, theoretically empowered Democrats are difficult to distinguish from the old, hamstrung Dems of a year ago. They're still too timid.

Rather than deftly acting to bring the troops home, the Democrats continue their eye-shifting and throat-clearing while the killing and dying go on and on. Last week, the new majority party yielded to the oxymoron argument that we have to support the troops by keeping them in the line of fire. The Feingold-Reid Iraq Bill that would have cut the funding and thereby forced the president to bring the troops home was defeated Wednesday in the Senate. On a procedural vote, the proposal that would have cut off money for combat operations in Iraq after March 31 of next year fell 31 votes short of the number needed to advance, losing 29-67.

The bill was defeated even as three U.S. soldiers remain missing and the death toll in Iraq is rising. The bill was defeated even as our puppet Iraqi government continues with its plans for a two-month vacation while the American men and women serving in their country are getting three months added to their yearlong tours of duty. The bill was defeated even as reports of poor care at Walter Reed Hospital for the mounting number of wounded troops is barely yesterday's news.

The Americans who voted the Democrats into power have been let down. Instead of counting on the Democrats to deliver on their implicit promise to end the occupation, we continue to count the costs of not correcting Bush's calamitous course. Those costs have been enormous in human casualties and financial resources. More than 3,300 U.S. military killed and more than 25,000 wounded -- nearly 1,000 of those amputees. A minimum of 63,796, a maximum of 69,850 civilians have been killed, according to the Iraqi Body Count Web site. More than 400 billion U.S. taxpayer dollars squandered. And we're not getting much bang for our buck. Daily attacks in Iraq have fallen only slightly to 149 in April from 157 in March. Mortar rounds are now battering the Green Zone, Baghdad's last presumed safe refuge.

Last week's vote was a loss for Wisconsin's Sen. Russell Feingold and other Democrats who want to bring the Iraq occupation to a halt. But the undertaking forced Democratic presidential hopefuls, including Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, previously reluctant to limit war funding, to come out in favor of the measure. Unfortunately, 19 Dems couldn't or wouldn't heed the distress signal that the American electorate fired last November, joining 47 Republicans in the vote to end the occupation funding. Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, is one of those Democrats. He said he opposes any measure that cuts off money for the war because ''we don't want to send the message to the troops'' that Congress does not support them.

That argument -- made smugly by legislators sitting safely and serenely in Washington, D.C. -- is about as logic-defying as others buzz-worded by the incompetent and corrupt Bush administration. We know them by heart. They play well to our emotions but not as well when we step back to question them. For example, could it be that setting a deadline to bring the troops home benchmarks the end of Americans dying for a continuously changing cause? What job are we staying to get done? Why are we staying where we're not welcomed? How are we supposed to secretly withdraw our troops without the insurgents knowing we're leaving?

We shocked and awed our way into Iraq four years ago, so if Baghdad should become an al-Qaida stronghold, what's to stop us from shocking and awing the city again? If 6 million Jews, surrounded by more than 200 million Arabs, have not been annihilated, why do we believe that an Iraq withdrawal will lead to a pitched battle with invading terrorist forces on Main Street in Peoria?

And, one last question: How much American blood has to flow to drown out the civil war in Iraq or cut through the hollow patriotic sloganeering here at home?